Modern General Ledger custom reports include zero-balance accounts
released
J
Julia Scott
Has anyone found a workaround for this?
When I open a standard Modern General Ledger report, it automatically excludes zero-balance balance sheet accounts with no beginning balance and no activity for the selected period.
However, if I simply save that report as a Custom Report (without changing anything), reopening the custom report includes those zero-balance accounts again.
The old "Show" settings (such as Non-zero) are no longer available in the Modern General Ledger, so there doesn't appear to be a way to retain the standard report's behavior after saving.
I contacted QuickBooks Support, and they indicated that this is currently how Modern Reports work: the standard report applies the Non-zero behavior dynamically, but once saved as a custom report, only the saved customization settings are used—and there is no option to save the Non-zero behavior.
This is especially frustrating because I use Office Scripts to automate formatting of exported General Ledger reports. The script can handle a lot, but filtering out these extra accounts would require looping through the exported rows, making the automation more complex, slower, and more prone to breaking if the export format changes.
Has anyone found a better workaround, or is this simply a limitation of Modern Reports?
Subhanan Sahoo
updated the status to
released
Subhanan Sahoo
Julia Scott Kristy James
Thanks for flagging this!
Quick clarification: showing non-zero/active accounts only is a setting available on summary reports — General Ledger is a detail report, so it works a bit differently.
That said, we did find and fix an issue where zero-dollar, deleted, or inactive accounts were showing up in the General Ledger. If you open a fresh General Ledger report now, you won't see this problem.
The issue you're seeing is likely because your custom saved report was saved before the fix went in, so it's not picking up the update automatically.
Fix: Open your custom saved report, tweak any filter (e.g. date range), then save it again. That'll re-trigger the report and apply the fix.
Let me know if the issue persists after that — happy to dig in further!
K
Kristy James
Non-zero accounts removed would be great! And now reports are splitting account balances, so that 1 account is reflected as 2 incorrect amounts, and there's no way to merge them together since one of the new accounts doesn't actually exist in the COA.
I wish they'd just roll back all the modern report changes as things were so much better reporting wise before!
J
Julia Scott
One additional piece of feedback on the support experience: there were several responses that ended with my name, such as "Standard reports are different than custom reports, Julia" and "Balance sheet accounts are different than income statement accounts, Julia."
I realize the intent was probably to personalize the conversation, but in the context of repeatedly correcting or explaining something, ending those statements with my name came across as condescending. It felt less like a discussion between professionals and more like I was being talked down to.
My questions were about the behavior of the Modern General Ledger reports—not about basic accounting concepts. A more collaborative tone would have made the interaction much more productive.
The status was updated to
under review